Monday, August 5, 2013

Labor Force Update

Participation is higher across the board, though the "M" for women persists. The exception is the 20-24 age bracket, where lower participation reflects women attending 4-year colleges (75% of young women attend some sort of post-high-school education, including junior colleges and technical schools).

The data show the rise of post-secondary schooling for men, but also a drop in participation of 25-29 year olds since the banking crisis, by 2+ percentage points. Older brackets dropped about 1.5 pct pts.
Data for women in older age brackets. Except for the age 70+ bracket, all have risen, but only over the last 6-7 years for women around retirement age.
Over the last 50 years we see the advent of retirement as the norm for men age 65-69, but with some reversal the last 6-7 years, similar to the shift in participation by older women.

This is my favorite graph, highlighting the monotonic rise in labor force participation by younger women, first by women in the 25-29 age bracket, then (starting about 15 years ago) in parallel by women in the 30-34 age bracket. Now that seems to have spread to women in the 35-39 bracket -- another year or two's data will help clarify...

No, I don't go to the OECD for data unless I'm doing some sort of quick-and-dirty cross-national comparison.

I don't recall whether I started with Stats Japan or went to JILPT (http://www.jil.go.jp/english/). My recollection is that these detailed data are published once a year in the annual summary of the Monthly Labor Survey, thus the January (or Feb?) issue.

About Me

I have wide interests as an economist. My teaching includes an array of introductory courses, and ones on the Japanese economy, the Chinese economy, industrial organization, the auto industry, and a senior seminar on macroeconomics.

One of my specialities is the Japanese economy. I became interested in East Asia as an undergrad at Harvard. After living in Tokyo
and then working on Wall Street for a now-defunct Japanese bank, I
headed to Yale for an economics PhD. As a result of lots of sweat, I also read and speak Japanese, helped by 7 years cumulative residence in Tokyo. I'm currently writing a book on the revolution in lifestyles in Japan over the
past quarter century.

Autos are my second interest. I grew up in Detroit and worked summers in
auto plants to help pay for college; that experience did not endear the
industry to me. But in grad school the (Japanese) auto parts industry provided
data for my dissertation; I've been pegged an auto person ever since.

Along with research on the industry from the perspectives of economics
and business history, I teach an auto industry seminar at W&L, blog, and serve as a
judge for the Automotive News PACE Supplier of the Year innovation competition, for which I've visited 2-3 finalists a year in the US, EU and Asia for the past 19 years. I'm not a car enthusiast, to me vehicles are a means to get from point A to point B. At present I own a Honda CR-V, a Nissan Sentra and a 1988 Chevy 4x4 8' bed pickup, useful in my neck of the woods in rural Virginia.